Wobblestrut & Other Proclivities

A dapper young man fights madness on the brink of existential collapse, treating ego-death with beer bottles. Another grasps the true nature of attraction; only to watch everyone in a high-end restaurant play indulgent children-himself included. A new hire clocks in for a typical first day but quickly suspects a con that may involve trafficking his own organs. Meanwhile, a pimp lives his final day like the king he is, as the hottest gentleman's club on the block whirls into panic. And inside a dank basement, a charismatic bum in a tremendous wig catches spliff-induced clarity so hard it unfurls into a lucid time traveling adventure!

Wobblestrut & Other Proclivities is a short-story collection set in a fictional DMV, where the County's comfort and neighboring Buss Ask's chaos blur into a darkly comic ecosystem of hustlers, lovers, weirdos, and emerging sovereigns. In these standalone, yet linked tales, Summerfield alchemizes the strange, tender, dark, with a ridiculous off-kilter approach to the everyday and an unsparing eye for the human condition-where the mundane goes uncanny before landing embarrassingly familiar.

Written in the voice of a lovechild between a stand-up folklorist, lyrical witness, and tall-tale prophet, this book may leave readers reeling from thought, feeling, and laughter-all at once, or in a single line where a joke, fresh insight, and old trigger catch them off guard. This is a local mythos of cast-outs and coronations where you'll do just fine; so long as you remember that true self is exposed after life shits on your shoulder...

Leslie Summerfield is a DMV-born author and poet whose work blends Black intellectual and liberation traditions, relatable yet raw provocative humor, Kafka's strange circumstances, and an obsessive love for the overlooked.

"What are you feeding your mind to write like this?" -- an esteemed peer